It’s the culture

School shootings aren’t new. But, Americans have owned guns aplenty for more-than 200 years of nationhood and it seems that we’ve never had school shootings as we have experienced in the past few years. Neither has the rest of the modern world, but school, church and shopping mall attacks have been occurring even in countries with the strictest gun controls (e.g., Scotland, Germany, Norway, Japan). What has changed?

How about “that which must not be named”?

The old-guard leftists of the Frankfurter and Antonio Gramsci (you can “wiki” those names) school knew that to fundamentally remake society, you first had to destroy the church, society and the family. I would say Gramsci and Frankfurter school alumnae have had a pretty good success record.

Ever since LBJ’s 1960s “War on Poverty”, families have been disintegrating. It started with the most vulnerable (inner city blacks, where now 70% of children have no fathers) and has now spread to white, non-Hispanic families (close-to 30% of children born out of wedlock). Often, children in such families are left largely unsupervised, grow up without good male role models and enjoy ready access to the most depraved pornography, graphic violence, weapons, drugs and other vices through the internet and their peers, starting at a very young and formative age. One can try to prevent their kids’ access to this at home, but how does one prevent them from going down the street to a friends’ house?

I couldn’t help but notice that the first media reports of the shooter (whom I refuse to name and help make more famous) mentioned a mother but didn’t mention a father. Sure enough, the latest reports by a British news outlet, The Daily Mail, are of a boy traumatized by a three-year old divorce. Why did he single out his mother as the first victim? We may never know, but I suspect that the divorce may have had something to do with it. We are also learning that (surprise!) the shooter was a compulsive violent-video gamer.

Youth and adolescence are a time when kids should be learning communication skills and how to interact with adults and peers. Instead, too many kids appear to be devolving into lonely social outcasts and losers (a non-PC term I use for emphasis only). Throw in mental illness, they can become dangerous (the source of much of this mental illness is a worthy topic in and of itself…but think about what hours and hours of sitting in front of a screen does to the developing brain of a young child?). These are the years when their neuro linkages are being formed.

The mass media and punditry immediately started talking about this shooter’s “obvious” mental problems, thereby anointing him a member of “victim” class and providing absolution for his sins. I don’t buy any of it. I can understand someone crazed with rage shooting their mother in the heat of the moment, but the premeditation and time the shooter needed took to travel to a school after killing his own mother and destroying young kids’ lives in psychopathic cold blood point not mental illness but a willing pact made with evil. It is evil, pure and simple, nothing less. At one point, this shooter was confronted with a choice and he chose evil. Why did he make that choice? Here’s a thought:

What are the cultural messages that get hammered into young kids’ brains today? There is no reward in elevation, but there is reward in depravity. Our mass media hammers into their developing brains, over and over again, that to be depraved is to be “famous”, a powerful siren’s song for lonely outcast kids. These kids know that the quickest way to fame and even fortune is to act depraved and to be guaranteed that their depravity will be broadcast widely over the internet and throughout the global media. Some of them grow into mega stars (I’m thinking of Rapper culture, Madonna, Lady Gaga and Jerry Springers as just a few examples), further amplifying the siren’s song. The mass media, vigilantly on the lookout for breaking news 24/7, is complicit in this, for it is the internet and mass media that provide monsters their 15 minutes of fame. Remember that the next time you look at how our TV screens extol depravity. Btw, if you doubt me about just how depraved our culture has become, then Google [game kindergarten killer].

Sorry to have to use the word “depraved” of course. In our Gramsci-Frankfurter culture, such terms are soooooo judgmental and we don’t dare to be judgmental, do we? Why, other people might not like us, a sentence worse than death for too many adults that never outgrew their adolescence.

So what do we do about it? We can start by focusing on our own kids, knowing that our obligation as parents is not just to love them but to build them spiritually into good citizens and to armor them against the bad influences in our imperfect world. We can extend support to single parents, especially those trying to work jobs simply to survive, and we help provide guidance to their kids. These are the days when wolves stalk a land in which too many people have forgotten how to recognize wolves for what they are. And, if you decide to have children, get married and stay married, so that you can nurture, protect and educate your children into solid citizens together. My very brilliant spouse, a middle-school teacher, tells me that she can tell right away when her students’ families are trouble by the way that the kids lash-out in school. She has already lost too many of her former students to drugs and suicide.

Rely on our churches? Maybe, but so many have become such weak tea. My own Episcopal church…part of the Anglican Communion that produced such great theological thinkers and moral stalwarts as C.S. Lewis (our patron saint, in my view)…has been complicit in this. It is so terrified of being perceived as “uncool” that it doesn’t dare attack popular culture or elevate its members above the culture…unless, of course, it is a soft target, such as those really uncool, nagging, square conservatives (a minority group of which I count myself a proud member). The sad fact is that my church, sadly dominated at the top by Frankfurter-Gramsci disciples, spends far too much of its time and effort huffing and puffing to keep up with the latest social trends in its frantic effort to appear cool and contemporary while pushing its “social justice” agenda. I don’t recall my church’s leadership ever raising a peep of protest against the depravity of contemporary culture. Excuses, yes. Protests, no. Quite the opposite.

One of my FB friends just shared an electronic ad from our church’s head bishop that includes scatological epiphets to get the message across. Soooo, soooo cool! So with it! Some churches are great builders of spiritual armor. Not this one. It prefers to be complicit with a depraved culture. It follows, it does not have the courage to lead. You may ask, of course, why I don’t leave this church, so I will answer that: because it is precisely there that I am needed. There are many good people there. I and others do speak out and try to nurture and strengthen our children with spiritual armor.

Is the solution to force honest citizens to surrender their weapons? That is thinking with the heart rather than the head. I am so, so totally against this. The solution to an outbreak of wolves is not to defang the guard dogs. In this age of the wolf, we need more guard dogs, not less.

The Connecticut school shooting could have been stopped right away had there been one or more people on premise with guns, a circumstance that today would land any would-be guard dog in jail without passing “go”. Chances are that, had the shooter known that the school was protected, he would never have dared go there. The only real defense against a gun…is a gun. Mass murderers tend to be cowards that seek out soft, undefended targets like schools and churches. Guns, like drugs, will always be available to psychopaths, criminals and terrorists. If not guns, there are always knives, automobiles, poison gas, molotov cocktails or fertilizer bombs. Taking guns away from civilians only creates a larger pool of defenseless sheep available for slaughter. One of my FB friends also suggested that only government and police should have weapons. Scary thought. Look around the world today: now, that is one very scary thought. Government and law enforcement magnets for wolves. But, then, this is how people who have never had to confront wolves perceive the world. Like the Hobbits of the Shire, content to eat, drink and be merry, free of cares. But, reality eventually intrudes and we cannot magically “wish” wolves away into oblivion.

Finally, there is one particular aspect of this that really, really bothers me: young kids for decades have been getting gunned down, knifed, beaten to death, suffocated and raped in our inner cities. But, other than perfunctory hand-wringing, we never saw an outcry against this compared to what occurred after this most recent shooting in a well-to-do middle class community. Gee, what could the reason for this be? Yup, you’re right.

We won’t change what appears to be happening with increasing frequency to our society until we decide that we will stand up and dare to speak out against the increased depravity of our culture. Definitely “uncool”, but we must do it…for all families, for the kids and for our future. Otherwise, it can only continue to get much, much worse. It is the age of the wolf.

There was a day, not too long ago, when that utterance would have meant your swift departure from public life and respect; and a swift exit from the Catholic Church. But “it ain’t happening” today, for 90% of the various churches have just gone along with a decaying culture, instead of standing as a rampart against it. Today what little faith remains, is in the pews, and almost none in the pulpits.

And then, it times such as these, people have the audacity to ask why God would let this happen. Never remembering, or preferring no to, that the political party ruling the country, actually booed him down, and removed him from their platform, along with support for Israel.

Along with God, regardless of denomination, comes a common to all set of rules and regulations that undermine and bind together a stable, prosperous, and caring society.

People need to be reminded that this is what they voted for, and this is what they got; a society that has no common norms and morays that bind us together.

JKB

Here’s what Democrats have wrought. Mentally ill turned out in the streets, no way to help the dangerous ones:

Cole Porter nailed it in the year of my birth, but even he did not dream of today:

Danny Lemieux

Caped Crusader, perhaps Cole Porter was a harbinger for the world devastation that followed shortly thereafter.

Beth

You are right on the mark. So afraid to be thought uncool, the tyranny of nice has eaten us alive. We have watched the destruction of churches and families and have barely said a word.
Has anyone here tried to intervene in a failing marriage? We have them all around us. No one is untouched by divorce–even if you yourself have never been divorced, it is impossible to not be touched by someone else’s decision to give up on their vow, their responsibility. I see divorce as the biggest cancer we have and it is so accepted–to the point of expected. It is a big factor of the lax in discipline we have seen in the past 50 years; it is a big factor in the jump in overabundance of ‘stuff’ for children we have seen in the past 50 years; it is a big factor in the declining church attendance in the past 50 years; it is a big factor in the exponential rise in pornography; it is a big factor in poverty in the past 50 years; it is a big factor in medicated children as single parents have no time to do what it takes to get their kids out from in front of the tv, and video games; it is a big factor in bullying in schools; it is a big factor that the schools/teachers unions/dea has been able to gain so much footing in the indoctrination of our children; it is a big factor in the lack of respect for life from conception to natural death.
Are we at the bottom yet? Are we able to climb out of the cesspool we’ve made for ourselves. Well, we certainly can’t climb out until we start calling out people on the way they fail their families and societies through divorce. Only one of the many things we’ll have to start doing to remake our society into a place where we want to live.

Caped Crusader: GREAT Pelosi quote — can’t use it without a link, though!

Our pastor mentioned the murder of little kids and wondered what happened that someone could be THAT evil, to kill innocent children. I suspect that the abortion regime has desensitized many to the old idea that innocence and dependence conferred some obligation on thinking adults. Stalin’s observation comes into play here — 20 dead kindergartners are a tragedy, but a million (unborn) dead babies is a statistic. Well, to some of these people, 20 dead kids is a statistic, too. That seems predictable, to my mind.

I highly recommend that everyone go see The Hobbit – we were at the Sacramento IMAX last night and found the movie WONDERFUL!

If you know the book, you will notice liberties taken, but none that changed the story or the meanings. I don’t know Peter Jackson’s politics, but he kept in the parts that Tolkien used to indict the timid and dishonest of his day, and that indict the same types today – you know who he means….those who are afraid of conflict, and of hurting people’s feelings, to the point that they refuse to call evil by its right name.

As you watch the movie, there comes a time when all that runs through your mind is “The Religion of Peace”…..at least, it did for me, and I’d be curious to see if you agree.

The Left is in the process of destroying this country. After benefiting from the ruin and suffering they caused, they use those very products as justifications for their transformation of America.

And all those emotional zombies in America simply follow the piper. Learning the value of something after you’ve lost it, is pathetically pointless. Relying on others to protect your life and liberties as if it is the natural way of things, will get people killed.

It was never the politicians that were executing Americans. But Americans that simply did whatever they were told, and executed their neighbors in cold blood. The politicians have clean hands, relatively speaking. They may pay out bribes and make laws, but they aren’t the ones that enforce it, they aren’t the police busting in doors confiscating guns like New Orleans did before Katrina. They aren’t the ones sitting idly by and accepting such injustice every single moment of the day and pretending nothing bad is happening. That would be so called Americans.

The Left has confused Americans concerning evil and good for decades now. What reason does anyone have to believe things will change just because of some new stuff that pulls people’s attention from oversea wars and shopping at the malls? They were Shopping at the Malls During War Too. They’ll keep on being attached to their electronic ipods and kindles until the world starts stomping the boot on their backs. then they will realize Who is Good and Who is Evil. But not until. Until then, they’ll believe whatever the media tells them they need to feel. In this case, home study is bad, Bible Belt is bad, the Leftist totalitarian government is good.

JohnC

A gun-free zone is a murder-zone.

When I see a gun-free sign this is what I hear:
“Dear homicidal maniac,
We certify there is no one inside this facility who can meet you with any real force.
You will have approximately ten minutes to kill as many people as you are able.
Signed,
The Management.”

I talked with a man the other day and he said “Well, you can’t have security guards in every school.” I said “Guards? You don’t need to employ guards. What’s wrong with all the other people in the school? The teachers, principals, vice-principals, janitors, lunch ladies, office workers, councilors, and others? These are grown men and women. If they choose to get a CCW they should be allowed to pack. There should be guidelines in schools for carrying on the job – not laws prohibiting it!”

So many people want to live in The Shire where wolves have been outlawed.
“No wolves here, Thank you. Why, I wouldn’t even know how to repel a wolf attack. And anyway we have people to do that if it ever comes up. Good morning.”

But wolves do not disappear just because people make it illegal to be a wolf.
And then, one day, a wolf is sniffing at your door…

Libby

The culture has been turned upside-down, so that every deviant behavior is to be accepted and considered “empowering,” while any mention of religion is offensive, and anyone who demonstrates self control (such as retaining virginity until marriage, not drinking alcohol) is mocked and derided. Heaven forbid one makes a value judgement on another’s behavior, unless it’s about smoking or food consumption.